Month: February 2016

Life can be very challenging at times, following our move to the UK from tropical climes we have had to to face up to higher prices and colder weather. Lucky for us this winter has been milder than normal. We realised from the start that we needed extra income. Jasmin my wife found some cleaning jobs to build an additional income stream , however it was at a cost. Lots of driving early morning and late nights for minimum wages. I spent six months applying for many jobs, filling in many forms and hearing nothing. What has happened to the country, it does not take much effort to send out a reply say sorry you have not been successful in this technological age.

The next problem is the zero contract hours usually run by agencies where you are registered on the books of an agency, you then rely on the agency to find you work. Both my wife and myself spent a few hundred pounds getting certified documentation such as Disclosure and Barring Services (DBS) checks for working with vulnerable people. Jasmin attended a week of care work training at her own expense and then never heard any thing more. My own teaching agency rarely contacts me and has never offered me work.

No replies to job applications are one thing but, if you are lucky enough to be selected for interview there are employers who still fail to advise you if you are unsuccessful.

With this kind of scenarios it is no wonder that people become disolutioned.

As last year drew to a close, we took stock of our situation and wrote out our new year resolution, publishing on a group page for anyone to see, this simple action help focussing on goals and from time to down when spirits are low, we have found it refocussed our minds and effort.

I decided that in view of the poor response to job applications, due possibly to my age, although Agism is banned in the UK, I would stop applying for jobs and would instead concentrate on building my own online business with MarketHive at the end of February.

The middle of February approached and my thoughts and actions started to change as I prepared to return to full-time online marketing and then the breakthrough on 17th February:-

Do you feel as strongly as we do about living life adventurously? Then Go Ape could be for you!

I Just love adventure it been in my blood for the past 15 years and is the reason I took early retirement and became an adventure racer!, my last job in my favoured sport was teaching sailing 8 months previously and this one although land based offered the chance to help people to enjoy outdoor challenges in safety.

This is my calling, my prayers have been answered.

Four days later I was requested to attend an interview/practical assessment. 7 fellow applicants on the half day assessment aged 17-30 all younger than my own children.

To start off we had to introduce ourselves speaking for two minutes and I was surprised that most found this hard, this was where their age was against them. As I got onto adventure racing, I asked them to stop me when they had heard enough.

We split into two groups for a team task, the result was our group would probably survive the other would probable not survive

The stakes were high on the physical test a climb UP a zipline, I was in the last two the youngest and the oldest, all our predecessors had completed the task. Being the gentleman I took the the slightly higher line which reduced my starting run up and we were off. My feet left the ground early and as the momentum from my run slowed it was hand over hand with my arms keeping a steady rhythm I pulled past the girl and as angel steepened approach the landing platform arms started to fail, I turn around to see if going forward was better, not really so turned backwards once again, so near I am not giving up, Stop hold on rest a little regain composure, climb again, burn in arms platform there, not quite last effort. Clip on safety lines . Success. The final task disconnect the pulley system, now the higher line presented a problem as I was already standing on tip tow and needed to jump to be able to release the karibeener. A few attempts were required with a little help from an instructor, a bang in the face, I was off. Time to encourage the girl who was now on the steepest part and was stalled ready to give up and no amount of encouragement would change her mind she gave up and returned down the zip. Final task attach to zip line and return to start, pleased to complete in style landing on my feet.

Final task one on one interview, felt confident, a very good company to work for even thuogh I had never heard of them

Was a little surprised but happy the following day to be accepted, and immediately set about raising my fitness level after an inactive winter.

Do you know that if you have a inbound marketing system it virtually guarantees success of your business, provided you pay attention to how you use it. There are so many ways to communicate with potential clients these days, you will always find something that will work for you. A lot of inbound marketing systems are automated, but you must never forget that your leads will respond better if you speak with them. Human Intervention is important for success.

I am a member of MarketHive which is a free for life marketing system offering a suite of essential tools fully integrated into a social media site, designed from the bottom to get your message across to potential clients.

I believe in the system which has been enhanced so as to offer serious marketers the opportunity not only to promote their own business but also a way of sharing in the advertising revenue of the system, with a pathway of optional upgrades levels marking levels of achievement and providing additional affiliate income.

Some people who own marketing systems tend to be attracted to the idea of passive marketing, it sounds good. Money for doing nothing. But to be honest, a lot more money can be earnt by taking an active role, encouraging and demonstrating to your leads, how to set-up the system to suit what they want to do.

Your leads need to be nurtured just like a parent nurture their children as they develop and learn about life and it is the same with MarketHive. The members you personally introduce are referred to as your children and you should support them. Additional support is provided from other members, plus a support team.

According to Jake Newfield Vice President of Business Development at Alumnify, Author of A Cloud in the Sky, Writer for Elite Daily & Tech.co
2016 signifies a new era of marketing. Customers are changing, and as marketers we need to change along with them. Traditional outbound marketing campaigns like cold emails, cold calls, snail mail, and trade shows are not as effective as they once were several years ago. Consumers are now bombarded constantly by ads, information, and other messages from marketers trying to sell them, and they have become jaded. An outbound campaign no longer packs the same level of effectiveness as it once did. Thus, to reach our consumers it will require a strategic, well-planned inbound campaign to stand out from the competition and get noticed. If we embrace it, this change can be good; it can create more opportunities and expand out client base. Inbound marketing offers a refreshing variety of new, effective techniques that can enable us to see unprecedented growth. However, if we fail to embrace this adjustment of customer acquisition, our business' growth can be stunted. Inbound marketing will be king in 2016, and success will largely be dependent on a company's ability to perform with it.

Now you know that inbound marketing is going to be important for success, you need to consider your options. What is going to work for you and how much are you prepared to pay. Prices vary from free to thousands of pounds a month, if you need help I suggest you watch this 30 minute video.

Using Inbound Marketing as a means of promoting your Company's Business and Website.

Inbound marketing is a way of promoting a company through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, e-newsletter’s, whitepapers, social media marketing.

Other forms of content marketing, lead pages, Search Engine Optimization which serve to attract customers through the different stages of promoting one’s own company fit “hand in glove” with the social engagement systems that is so prevalent in today’s market

In contrast, buying attention, cold-calling, direct paper mail, radio, TV advertisements, sales flyers, spam, telemarketing and traditional advertising are considered "outbound marketing" and seem to be having a secondary role in a Company’s marketing activities.

Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects' attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easier to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.

Many companies are now realizing that their technical documentation, often considered a "necessary evil", is now considered a way of producing authoritative and trustworthy content that can become a Company’s most effective inbound marketing channel, generating more than half of overall site traffic and over half of lead generation.

Once a website has been constructed and the content optimized for the chosen key words, the main objective or strategy of a smart webmaster will be to submit the Website to the Search Engines and obtain as many Social Inbound Links.

One-way Inbound Link is an external link pointing from social accounts to your website from another site. You need not reciprocate; in other words, you do not have to link back to that website. On the other hand, in Reciprocal Linking, to obtain an external link from another site pointing to your website, you have to link back to that site or reciprocate with a link from your website.

In recent times One-Way Inbound Links have received a lot of prominence and smart webmasters are spending their time, effort and energy in obtaining more One-Way Inbound Links rather than Reciprocal Links. The stampede to obtain One-Way Inbound Links is understandable once you know the facts and the benefits of having these links.

The Search Engines have begun to realize that many Webmasters have started adopting various ruses to artificially increase their link popularity and the page rank of their websites. Many website owners started manipulating the system to their advantage such as purchasing high PR links and adopting certain Black Hat techniques. This approach can be very detrimental to one’s business in the long term

Hence the Search Engines have now begun to consider One-Way Inbound Links superior to Reciprocal Links because, if a website links to your website without obtaining a link back, it clearly indicates that your site is a site of quality and that it is popular with a lot of other sites.

If your website has many One-way Inbound Links, especially links that are of quality and relevance then your website will be ranked higher than those sites with just reciprocal links. So it stands to reason that the more number of quality and relevant One-way Inbound links you obtain the greater and faster your chances of increasing your link popularity and page rank and the higher your site will rank in the searches for your keywords.

Smart webmasters soon began to realize the importance of one way inbound links and started adopting certain strategies to obtain them such as:

1. Submitting the website to high page rank quality social sites and to Niche or specialized directories.

2. Writing high quality articles displaying their Company’s expertise and submitting these articles to article directories, article banks and article distributors, thereby creating a viral effect with webmasters picking up these articles and publishing them.

4. Submitting articles to Social Bookmarking Sites. Most of these sites have a high page rank and are a valuable source for inbound links.

These Strategies not only help Webmasters boost the link popularity and page rank of their websites but also help the websites to rank high in the Search Engines for their keywords.

In addition to the above, Targeted traffic will soon start flowing from hundreds or even thousands of links in the Resource boxes of these articles, from Directories, Forums, Blogs and Social Bookmarking sites.

These are actually visitors searching the Internet for websites, products and services like yours or admirers of your expert articles who could end up as customers or members of your list.

Acting smart and adopting your strategies to suit the changing algorithms of the Search Engines is the best way to move forward and be ahead of the competition.

The ultimate goal is to obtain good Link Popularity, High Page Rank and substantial Traffic to your website. It appears that for all practical purposes, One Way Social Inbound Links have come to stay and the stampede to acquire these links will continue.

You have some great ideas; have a lot of enthusiasm you’re ready to start. You’re going to make a large amount of money and be your own boss. Well wait a minute regardless of the claims of how easy it is to get rich off the Internet.

You will find starting an online business is no different than starting a business in the non-virtual world. Maybe you need to consider some things first to make this profitable and mistake free.

When contemplating starting an online business you need to take an honest look at yourself. What are your skills? What kind of interests do you have? Many people stared their online business in the fields that they worked. A graphic artist could start a web design company or produce custom graphics. You will also want to think of the type of jobs you truly enjoy.

Do your homework to start your online business. Do not make the mistake of putting all your efforts, money and time into a service you want and try and find a market for it. You cannot make people like your service or product. Instead find out what the consumer would like and then design a service or product to fit that need.

Risk

Also just like a real world business there is a certain amount of risk. By doing your homework you can lessen that risk by finding something people will buy and for how much. This allows you adjust your costs to make sure of a profit.

You also need to study your competition. Find out what they are doing and what works or what doesn’t work. The more information that you have in regards to the market and your competition the better chance of success you will have.

Starting your online business, you need to have a plan and follow it. What will it cost to start? Where will you get that money? If you are going to ask for a loan you will need to have a business plan to present to the loaning institution. It is a good idea to have a business plan even if you are funding your online business yourself. It will give you some set goals to look at.

To get your online business going you will need to make a time commitment and keep it. It will be difficult to keep a full time job and work on your new online business. You probably will not be able to accomplish that unless you set a specific time to work on it. Starting an online business and making it profitable enough for you to work full time on it does take some time.

You have done the required research, taken the time and made the commitment for your online business. You feel that now have a great product that the world wants and priced that they can afford and you make a profit. You have one more thing to consider marketing. Your customers need to be able to find your product so they can purchase it. This can be done online, offline, or a combination of them both.

You will need to continually study what works and what doesn’t until you find what works for you the best. However, remember what works today, may today may not tomorrow and be able and willing to change your approach to marketing as the consumer’s dictate.

A lot of business people pass through different trials during the period they are dealing with the launch and development of their company. Even if you are used to daily meetings, you will discover that for business meetings with clients and for signing contracts you need lots of strategies and abilities.

You have to collect supplementary information.

A simple phone call can anticipate the needs of your client. You have to learn more about them and prepare yourself for that face-to-face meeting learning more about the client’s company. Then create a list that has on it all the benefits your services will bring him.

The objective has to be realistic.

The experts calculated that a business meeting with your clients can cost you up to several hundred dollars, depending on the domain of the business and on location. So it is important for every meeting to be convincing for the client. If you are a public relations consigliore, for instance, a realistic objective for a first meeting would be the detailed presentation of the offer.

You must present quality products. Prepare your documents printed well on quality paper. You have to bring all needed, business cards, estimative graphs, brochures, presentation materials.

You must carefully analyze your client. All through the meeting, watch closely his behavior. It’s good to notice if he is approving of your ideas or if he isn’t. Pay attention to signals your client is sending and make sure to answer accordingly.

Any questions put must be well thought. A business meeting is an opportunity to discover your client’s needs and to present him with the solutions. If the discussion between you two isn’t equilibrated and you are the one that is doing all the talking, it means the meeting is a failure. It is important for you to put the right questions, but also to know how to listen carefully to answers.

You must always go for real cases and examples. True stories can demonstrate the fact that you kept in mind your client’s needs. Prepare for every quality and ability a demonstrative story. It’s preferable to tell a story that talks to the client about the benefits the rest of your clients and consumers have.

Provide efficient solution and act on time! Assuming you prepared very well and you used the observations efficiently, now you have reached the moment when you can ask directly the things you are interested in. This is important and it must not be missed. Some people organize great meeting but when it comes to closing the deal they leave home bear handed.

When getting to this, you must have the strength to act and go on with it.

They can be used to announce a new blog, website, videos, or to be controversial within your content. They are a phenomenal way to ramp your business and get exposure.

The first thing you want to do is look at some good press release sites. One that is recommended is www.prlog.org. The one thing about this site though is they don’t allow you to sign up using popular email accounts. If you have a Gmail account, Yahoo account, or Hotmail, you can’t use that to sign up and submit a press release through their service. If you already have a domain out there and your own email, then you can use www.prlog.org.

Keep in mind that this is all about being a no cost program. So we aren’t asking you to go out and do any of that until you have generated some revenue. I do want to point out though that this press release site service is a good one. They offer lots of examples of content that people include in a press release.

The site gets lots of exposure; it is always ranked very high up in the search engines. It is a reliable free source to get your content on. Another really good site to look at, and you can’t submit here as it isn’t free, is www.prweb.com. If you go to the News Center, you will find all of the new press releases for the day. It is a really good way for you to find out what is going on and to see what types of current press releases are out there.

Then you can go from there and determine how to write your own press releases and the types of information to put in them. That is the value of www.prweb.com. Click the news center, and you will see there are lots of types of press releases. For example, one that I want to point out is a survey result. You can get those survey results for something in your niche market. You can use that information to create your own press release for it to share that information.

There are several sites I go to that actually help me to find free press release sites to post to. I go to www.google.com and type in Submit Press Release Free. This will give you a good idea of what is out there currently. Put in quotes around those words and you will get the best results. You will find several websites that jump out. You can get an idea here of what you can use.

Most of them are self-explanatory. You need to create a username and password. You can create accounts on a few of them and then you can set up your press release there. Some of them ask for a business name and a few more details. You can just tell them that you are in a certain niche market and that you are trying to share information with people about what your products are in that niche market.

The title of our press release should tell a story. It should encompass what your press release is going to be about. For example, Controversial Video Reveals 5 Ways that People Can Improve their Golf Game. A good summary should also be there to tell what your press release is about. At www.pressrelease.com, they give you a template.

You need a good introduction.

Again, I recommend you look around to see what a good press release should look like. It is very simple to get a press release submission done on most of these sites. Another that you may want to check out is www.pressrelease.com and you can get started there with creating an account and then posting that.

Many of these free press release sites do ask you for a company name and address. If you aren’t comfortable with putting in your name and your home address while you get started, don’t do it. You can just skip doing press releases for now until you get that all set up with an outside source. If you do want to move forward with it, you will need to enter what it asks for them to approve your account.

Your headline should be catchy and keyword rich for any press release.

Your body needs to say who, what, where, when, and why. It needs to have a call to action too such as a link to your website. Make sure you choose a free press release.

Some of the sites have different types that you pick from. You may be asked to list your keywords.

Make sure you stay within the guidelines of what the press release site allows.

Some of them are strict and you don’t want your press release to get declined. If you do it the right way, a press release can be a great way to get more exposure and more traffic.

Original and Fresh Content is not as easy as it sounds. We are talking about unique information that will move people to your site. See, the problem with many companies showing up on the top page today is that their pages are optimized for Google with a combination of nonsense sentences and keywords. So, my approach is, why not build a website that actually is optimized for humans?

When you do this, you are automatically taking care of the optimization for Google. Come on people, we all know that Google has game and they’re increasing their technology every day finding ways to get rid of this “optimization” deal. Google is always on the side of the users and never the advertisers keep that in mind.

Guess what, once you have original and fresh content, people are going to want to visit your site and link to your site. Hey, we just took care of Popularity as well. I’m not saying you do not have to work on the link exchange thing but promise me that it will be minimal. Also you want to stay away from link farms, link exchange offers and paying for links.

So I hear that question, how else am I going to bring links to my site? The answer is content. Write articles, submit it to article sites. Prepare a PR, submit it to Prweb.com. Believe me; all these will bring links to your site. All you have to do is, mention your website at the end of these articles and make sure you link to your site with your advertised link text.

Now you are thinking, “That’s it; I have the content and the links, I’m the king of Google”. That would be wrong. Always remember that while you are doing content and popularity, there are a million competitors doing that and more. So you want to Maintain your content. You want to update it every week so every time Google spiders come to visit your site, they find new useful information. Keep up with daily life and updated news.

For example, if you sell farming supplies and the price of grain goes up, you should write an article and put it in your site. Also publish those articles on other articles sites. You can find these sites easily with a “article submit” search on Google.

The UK government has just announced that testing of autonomous vehicles in the UK may take place on roads in the UK, including a section of specially adapted motorway, I suppose that this is good news but it will be some time before you will see a car without someone sitting in the driving seat.

Anyone who has used an in car navigation will know that GPS is an aid but does not at the moment provide information on one way streets and bus lanes. In fact at times it can be a distraction for drivers. I have on occasions approaching or on a round about listening to the instruction nearly forgotten to observe traffic lights and at least once had to advise my wife to make a left hand turn due to the road ahead being restricted to buses only.

Clearly a lot of work will be required for vehicles to be able see and react to their surrounding as well as knowing where they are and how to get to their destination. Laws will need to be amended, to cover situations where a driver is not in control of a vehicle, even if seated in the drivers seat as vehicle is switched to autonomous mode.

Inter vehicle communication is envisages with cars signalling each other when they are braking or encountering road hazards such as traffic jams, accidents and hazardous road condition, but these are in the future. During the first phase there will be a test driver ready to take override action when necessary, Autonomous mode wll probably be restricted to motorway driving and slow speed manoeuvres